DNS for Tor Exit Relaying

One of the major pieces of infrastructure run by Tor Exit Nodes is DNS. DNS is the system that translates human readable names, like emeraldonion.org, into IP addresses. In Tor, the exit node is the location where this translation takes place. As such, DNS has been recognized as one of the places where centralization or attacks could be performed that could affect the integrity of the Tor network. To serve our users well, we want to mitigate the risks of compromise and surveillance as we resolve names on behalf of our users. It’s these principles that direct how we structure our DNS resolution.

Emerald Onion currently uses pfSense, which uses Unbound for DNS. Per our architectural design, we run our own recursive DNS server, meaning we query up to the root name servers for DNS resolution, and avoid the cache any upstream ISPs offering us DNS resolvers. This also means we query the authoritative resolvers directly, minimizing the number of additional parties able to observe domain resolutions coming from our users.

General Settings:

We use DNS Resolver and disable the DNS Forwarder

Only bind the DNS listener to the NIC the Tor server is connected to and localhost.

Only bind the DNS outgoing interface to the NIC that carries our public IP. If you use BGP, do NOT bind DNS to the interface used to connect to BGP peers.

Enable DNSSEC support

Disable DNS Query Forwarding

We don’t use DHCP, leave DHCP Registration disabled

Same goes with Static DHCP

Custom options:

The most important of these options is qname-minimization, which means that when we perform a resolution like www.emeraldonion.org, we ask the root name servers only for who controls .org, the Org name servers, who controls emeraldonion.org, and only ask emerald onion’s name servers for the IP of www.emeraldonion.org. This helps to protect against our traffic resolutions being swept into the various “passive DNS” feeds that have been commoditized around the network.

Hiding the identity and version helps prevent the leakage of information that could be used in attacks against us. Prefetch Support changes how the DNS server fetches DNS records. Without it, it fetches the DNS record at the time of the request. With Prefetch Support, it refreshes the DNS entries as each record’s TTL expires helping to further obfuscate requests and makes it harder for specific Tor request correlation attacks.

Access Lists:

We don’t use this, but if you want to work with the Access Lists, that should be fine, just keep it in mind when troubleshooting.